EGU 2019

Summary
The EGU General Assembly is the biggest yearly meeting of general Geosciences in Europe. It offers a variety of oral and poster presentation throughout all disciplines, as well as short courses. During the conference we had the chance to present our current research projects, discuss the results with other experts and attend several other presentations inside and outside our field of expertise.
Furthermore did we get the chance to attend the ArcTrain splinter meeting to receive updates from both ArcTrain Germany and Canada and to exchange with the other ArcTrain students and PIs, including latest progress on the planning of this year’s annual meeting and field trip.
Besides sessions on scientific research progress and soft skill courses, the EGU also offers a variety of special events for early career scientists, such as networking receptions, career panels, workshops on funding opportunities and many more. All these events have a very open and friendly atmosphere to make it easy for everyone to ask any kind of upcoming question and can be very helpful and inspiring. We were also able to attend a few of these events.

Activities & personal benefits

This was the first time I attended the EGU General Assembly.  After some time of orienting myself at this very large assembly, I took the chance to visit some oral and poster sessions dealing with my research field and some just scratching it. The latter, especially a session about biodiversity, provided me with some unexpected ideas and new analysis tools for the software R, which I use a lot for my data analysis. These ideas and new tools will certainly be fruitful for future work on my project. During the poster session CL4.09 I presented a part of my project that will make up the content of a paper. During this session, I had fruitful discussions with people inspiring me on the content of this paper and leading to a collaboration for the second part of my project. I also had the chance to talk to someone about a possible future collaboration for the time “after the PhD”. My attendance at the EGU has been highly motivating and inspiring and will most certainly improve my future work.

Sabrina

This was my second time at the EGU General Assembly. Just as last year I gained a lot of inspiration and motivation from this conference. This year I was given the opportunity to have my first oral presentation during a large conference. Even though it can be a bit intimidating and overwhelming to speak in a large room in front of many unknown people, outside the familiar atmosphere of ArcTrain seminars and annual meetings, it was a great experience for me. I received a lot of positive feedback after the talk and some of the questions asked were rather helpful. However, compared to the poster I presented last year during the EGU General Assembly, the discussion potential during an oral presentation is rather limited. I did, anyhow, have some fruitful discussions with other authors at their posters in related fields as well as more distant fields, but potential interesting ones for my future career. Additional to presenting my own research, I was also given the opportunity to present our outreach activities within ArcTrain, together with Maren Walter. It has been a nice change to all the strictly scientific discussions.

Lina

For me it was also the second time I got the chance to participate in the EGU General Assembly in Vienna. The first time I attended the General Assembly was during the first year of my PhD in 2017. Since then, my PhD project has undergone some development and I got a better insight into ongoing research and the oceanographic community. Therefore, instead of being completely overwhelmed by the enormous amount of presentations and people at the conference, I could now benefit better from its various offers and possibilities.
Just as last time, I presented my work in the poster session The North Atlantic: natural variability and global change. During that session, I had the chance to talk to many different people about my research, possible future collaborations and about other research projects relevant to my work. Besides these fruitful discussions, attending several other oral and poster sessions was very interesting and helpful for me. Additionally, apart from several purely scientific sessions, I also attended some sessions and networking events especially addressing early career scientists and focusing on the question what comes after the PhD? and related topics which become now, in the third year of my PhD, increasingly important.

Hannah